ＷＥＬＣＯＭＥ ＴＯ ＴＨＥ ＡＢＹＳＳ

xe/xem/xyr or they/them

[pissvortex]

evo morales teleporting behind elon musk with a katana

[third-nature]

🔮 like to charge 🔮

🔥 reblog to cast 🔥

[determinate-negation]

what are your thoughts on qanon?

its very fascinating. during/after the election i was watching a bunch of qanon and alex jones videos to see what theyre saying and the ideological makeup is really crazy. its primarily conspiratorial in that it doesnt have a specific theory or order to its beliefs, its based on vague connections between things and invocations of various threats and values. but the qanon videos (and alex jones) frequently use legit anti capitalism and language that would appeal to workers and then immediately flip it to being about the globalist new world order and the democracts and so on. its done really seamlessly and i think it gets power from the fact that people do recognize a class imbalance, wealth inequality, the hypocrisy of politicians, etc, but it directs that attention to its conspiratorial reactionary worldview. i think its similar to how 20th century fascists took aspects of revolutionary and anti capitalist rhetoric from communists and used it towards fascist aims, while also vocally opposing communism and villianizing it as part of its conspiracy. i think that rhetoric disappears more quickly in qanon (it seemed like it was only in the first videos from what i watched) but it is a common feature of a lot of that type of reactionary thought. these types of conspiracy-cults have existed for a while and i think they draw on both peoples nationalism and racism and their underlying frustration with life under capitalism, that they will not define as such because they believe in the idea of capitalism. its interesting that in the united states they largely revolve around notions of freedom, liberty, the free market and a fight against a vague totalitarian/communist/finance capital enemy, they very much play up the underdog or freedom fighter image and you the spectator are put into the place as one of the many people fighting for liberty against the globalist-new-world-order-whatever. alex jones has insane commericals every 15 minutes where he implores you to buy his turmeric supplements so you too can contribute to the info war. qanon is one the more ridiculous ones of these reactionary cults and im not sure where it will go because none of the shit they predicted happened (of course) theres a lot of qanon rallies happening abroad though, especially in germany where they got picked up by the far right, which is really interesting. i dont think it will become a major force but i could see it influencing political movements

[afloweroutofstone]

I don’t know how else to tell y’all that the difference between “X is a social construct” and “X isn’t real” is very, very, very, very important!

[quasi-normalcy]

Money is a social construct. Laws are a social construct. Prison is a social construct. All are very real, as you will find out if you ever rob a bank.

[aevios]

What “X is a social construct” means: this concept is something created and reinforced by our society, and therefore it isn’t necessarily a fundamental or natural truth of existence, and we should be able to modify, expand, or eliminate said construct if it does harm or doesn’t accurately represent or help the people living in said society.

What “X is a social construct” doesn’t mean: we made this thing up so it is totally meaningless and has absolutely no consequences.

[queeranarchism]

Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s

From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.

Green-houses use a lot of fuel, but passive alternatives exist. This article dives into the European history of fruit walls and passive green houses. In addition there is an article about Chinese passive greenhouses: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/reinventing-the-greenhouse.html

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

a good example of a “social construct” is national borders. bc like:

arbitrary and made up

but strongly enforced 

often unfair & unreasonably defined

used as a tool of oppression

can be changed at any time but only by the powerful (and so are usually only changed to benefit the powerful)

individuals spend their lives accommodating them at great cost

so when we say “social construct” we don’t mean “not real.” we mean “hey we control the way this thing works, and the way it exists now is hurting a lot of people. so we should probably design it better & make it less rigid. which we can do, bc we built it.”

[tchaikovskaya]

this is where “platforms have a responsibility to take down fake news!!!!” shit was always headed, for the record

[tchaikovskaya]

yall are really like “the only reason someone would not want Facebook, Inc. to be the ultimate arbiter of truth and falsehood in cyberspace is if they’re a fascist”  

[ratliker1917]

I think we should’ve forced the nerds to read more fucking theory, like we just wanted to be reasonable, let people understand that you don’t need to have read both volumes of capital to be a socialist, then people took this further and were like “you just need COMMON SENSE to be a socialist” so now we will forever have to deal with people who learned everything about politics from cartoon network television show fandom drama, who feel like they know as much about politics as any dedicated lifelong Marxist or Anarchist, perhaps even more.

[ratliker1917]

To be clear the reason “don’t read theory” is a terrible fucking idea isn’t because theory is like, some manner of sacred texts containing the truth of the universe, it’s because a complete rejection of all theory is literally rejecting the entire socialist historical project, it’s basically declaring yourself capable of grasping at every social issue with pure common sense, granting your own arbitrary and subjective decisions more weight than like, the life work of hundreds of dedicated activists and revolutionaries who had to deal with these social issues as well, who might have spent all their lives studying and trying to understand society so that they could change it. “Don’t read theory, just use common sense” is actually not an anti-elitist slogan, it’s immense intellectual arrogance that declares you, who has done no investigation, more capable of making political decisions than every socialist who has lived and died before you.

[animatedtext]

requested by ambiguous-abroooo

[altonin-deactivated20180325]

if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right

[funereal-disease]

This post is the distilled essence of everything I believe in.

[howboutthatbreadtho]

Just to add, there will also always be an itinerant part of the population that will be wandering around. Giving people homes is one side of the coin, safeguarding Rambler’s Rights like making encampments and free movement is the other. Providing resources while also making people safer from police violence in general has to be among our goals.

[fabioafterdark]

indeed

[scavengedluxury]

[wodneswynn-deactivated-deactiva]

Hey, listen: We’re not gonna get anywhere with this “socialism” stuff unless we can establish solidarity networks that provide real, tangible aid. And I do mean “tangible” in the sense of “you can fill up a box with it.”

Back in the old-timey days, when we didn’t have things like a minimum wage or government assistance, folks didn’t think twice about paying union dues every month out of their meager paychecks. And in those days, when it was a regular, everyday occurrence for union people to get beat up or outright murdered for their union-ing, the unions still managed to win a lot of their fights. Reason for all that? The bigger part of them union dues I mentioned *went into a strike fund*.

Time on a picket line means time off the clock. And as for me, in this economy, if I go a week without a check, my family don’t eat. I go two weeks without a check, and we’re homeless. And them’s the brakes.

[jenroses]

In my community we started a co-op in order to, in part, purchase things with mass buying power (i.e. we can get things at wholesale if we order enough of them, so we can, for example, eat organic food for about what conventional costs a lot of the time.) But we also set aside a little money each time we order, and that money helps pay for donation boxes… and the social network we created when we created the co-op means that if someone has a crisis, someone else probably has the answer. “This family just lost their job and can’t afford to buy presents for their kids” may get a response of “Here are presents for every single family member” or it might end up with finding a job for the people looking for work, or both, because the co-op membership is diverse and represents a lot of people who are otherwise very connected in the community. When a part of town is out of power, it’s usually possible to find a co-op member who can run for ice or bring a meal, or offer use of a washer/dryer for the evening. We had one year where we were making donation meal boxes for a holiday, found out on the last delivery about a family in severe need, talked about it in the co-op group and ended up showing up at their house with not only a meal, but enough dry goods, paper towels, toilet paper, etc. for a month, plus a credit with the co-op for fresh fruits and veggies. I cannot overstate the power of networking in your community. This one started out in a natural parenting group, but quickly spread beyond that, from college students to retirees. It’s like a small town, only more open-minded. We started with about 20-30 families. There are now hundreds of people involved. I had a trans kid land with me at one point and asked if anyone had size whatever clothes and within a few hours we had a box on my porch, within a couple days we had a bunch of things he needed. The co-op keeps a lending library of tools and weirdly specific kitchen devices like an Æbleskiver pan, a food dehydrator, a capsule maker and a carpet cleaner. The kinds of things people need once or twice a year, but might not have the room to store. We periodically do a buy of sensory toys and sensory bin supplies, for example, because we have a lot of autistic members and parents of autistic kids. I have bought socks from the co-op that were purple with unicorns farting rainbows on them. We recently got in Black History flashcards and we’ve done a lot of Black Lives Matter and Hate Has No Home lawn signs. Pretty much if people want it and we can find it at wholesale, the co-op will order it. It even spawned a side-business (more than one, actually, but this is the relevant one) of an online app for co-op managing, called http://managemy.coop so that other communities could take advantage of our experience and start out with an easier tool than the google spreadsheets we started out with. Anyway… if you want to network within your community, this is a really, really good way of connecting with a broad cross-section of people.

[nyshadidntbreakit]

All that stuff about unions still applies, too. Unions have hardship funds. If you’re a union member and you’re broke, or you’ve been fired, or whatever, you can apply to the union for a grant to help you out. The binmen in Birmingham pulled off a months-long strike recently thanks to the union paying their living costs. Unions force employers to pay decent pension contributions and have safe sick leave policies.

If you’re employed, join your damn union!

[ratliker1917]

American libs get so mad about the word "neoliberal" like it makes them go "how dare you use this word to refer to politicians from both parties??? you're just both-sidesing!!! it doesn't mean anything!!" because they actually cannot conceive of the fact that the core ideology of nearly every mainstream american politician is extremely similar on economic matters. anything that accurately describes the hegemonic political ideology of the United States gets dismissed because these people desperately want to believe the two major parties are super different.

[insomniac-arrest]

people talk all the time about “primal instincts” and it’s usually about violence or sexual temptations or something, but your humanity comes with a lot of different stuff that we do without really thinking about, that we do without being told to or prompted to

your average human comes pre-installed with instincts to:

Befriend

Tell story

Make Thing

Investigate

Share knowledge

Laugh

Sing

Dance

Empathize with

Create

we are chalk full of survival instincts that revolve around connecting to others (dog-shaped others, robot-shaped, sometimes even plant-shaped) and making things with our hands

your primal instincts are not bathed in blood- they are layered in people telling stories to each other around a fire over and over and putting devices together through trial and error over and over and reaching for someone and something every moment of the way

[full-moon-phoenix]

~“Your primal instincts are not bathed in blood.”

My god this is beautiful. Such a refreshing change of pace to the constant glorification of instinctual human violence.

[nowscience-blog]

How many people can say they have played rugby with a Beluga whale? 🐳 🏉

[pugnacious-pacifism]

I’m putting this back on my radar. I want this life

[kinka-juice]

I believe this is Hvaldimir, who, get this, is believed to be a defected Russian spy. Literally.

He showed up in Norway in April 2019 wearing a camera harness labeled “equipment of St. Petersburg”, has tried pulling ropes on boats, is obviously very familiar with people and prefers to hang with people. While we know Russia has marine mammal government programs (the US does too, but it’s bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions), the extent of their programs is not declassified like the US Navy’s are.

He likes to play fetch and be scratched around the blowhole.

He has taken a diver’s knife out of the scabbard, played with underwater drones, stolen a go pro from a kayaker, and other mischief. Notably, it has been said by the Murmansk Marine Biology Institute, who may have been who trained Hvaldimir, that seals are better equipped to be polar military animals, as they have high professionalism that belugas lack.

Anyhow, enjoy Hvaldimir (the name combines the Norwegian word for whale, Hval, with Vladimir, as in Putin), the defected Russian spy whale.

[xenocuriosa-deactivated20210412]

seals are better equipped to be polar military animals, as they have high professionalism that belugas lack.

[midnineties]

i’m just going insane

[erykah-budew]

“Cars” reboot in the style of the movie “Cats” and all the cars are just humans walking around naked but with a metallic sheen and they have wheels at the end of their limbs. Their faces are human faces but with car headlights instead of eyes.

[conibitty]

[screamingay]

it is the nature of man that every so often we invent starlight express again

[memewhore]